The first time my doctors wanted me to go on disability, I refused. I thought it was quitting, admitting to everyone and myself that I was broken, which was something I'd spent over a decade trying to avoid. Instead I continued working, only to be waylaid by a bigger, badder version of what ailed me six years later.

This time, my psychiatrist told me, I didn't have a choice. It wasn't a factor of would I be able to work, or should I be working, it was that working was flat out impossible.

But this time, I had a backup plan.

I'd always loved writing. From scribbling out half-baked beginnings on Post-It Notes while working at the 1-Hour Photo, to my 19 year fan fiction obsession, storytelling had been a long-time hobby. At Kenyon, I joined the legions of would-be poets, reading out poorly edited free-verse about breasts or cigarettes in falling down barns.

You see, the episode that stopped me from working was in June. But I'd started working on a novel in April.

It was a task I'd taken on lightly. I figured it would be easy with my experience at roleplaying and writing about Star Wars. Besides, I'd been thinking about it for two years, so the plunge into character development, crafting scenes and chapters, and writing an ending couldn't be that hard, right?

So ... I'm still working on that novel, and I've learned a lot.

I traded one profession I was head over heels in love with for another. Social Work is not a career someone enters into lightly. I left my MSW Program a different person than I was when I entered it. Ditto with writing. I changed again. If I thought I was compassionate, patient, willing to help, and observant before, I have become only moreso, but in a different way.

I started a writers group for my friends in May of 2014. It was unstructured, like my writing then. I didn't follow any rules for critique or process, much like my narrative had no structure and my dialog followed no rules of punctuation. Now, I host a critique group of six writers with Operational Guidelines and a formal critique structure. We schedule two months in advance and submit our pieces a week ahead of time to allow for ample time for reading.

I am also happy to report that I have formalized my dialog tags and learned how narrative works.

When I had to change professions it wasn't by choice. I turned what had always been a hobby into a career out of necessity, as I have always had a work ethic that precludes me from consuming all Netflix has to offer as a vocation.

I had to learn to structure my days, more than they ever were in my eight years as a social worker. I am my own boss, something I learned how to do in my former profession, which required me to make my own executive decisions and prioritize my tasks and time in a maelstrom of change.

What I am saying to you is: change is not the end of the world, and hard life choices are not armageddon. It's what we do in the wake of those decisions that make us who we are and decide who we will become. I could have followed my first idea about disability and quit entirely, but that's not who I am, and it never will be.

Hell, I won't even quit smoking.

I tell myself I'm a writer because that's who and what I want to be. It's the power in the language that gets me out of bed in the morning, gets me to read, gets me to walk the dog, exercise, eat breakfast, and continue working. Even though my first priority is taking care of myself, I do it all under the pretense that I'm a writer, not under the pretense that I'm broken.

I make these choices because they keep me stable. Watching every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation will not make me feel better. Reorganizing the (now obsolete) DVDs on the shelf will only send me staring at the ceiling contemplating the inevitability of decay. I have to decide to do work every day, to be active, to keep moving forward.

And while I build this new persona of me - a writer, a confident person, the Me I have always wanted to be - I have to prepare for the future. There may be more choices ahead that may sideline me. Further career changes. More abilities and people lost. But I walk calmly into the darkness as my flashlight guides me, because I refuse to fear the dark.

Growing up the sort of person who carried the basketball down the court, and tripped on her two left feet on the track, I had to find different ways to be competitive than in the sporting arena. So, I excelled at Debate Club and Model United Nations, but my competition was nothing but boys, and every girl growing up in the 1990s knew that boys don't like girls who schooled them in politics. I did what every boy-crazy teenager did in those dark days, I turned my competition inward: I celebrated everyone's successes, and flogged myself with my own, using them as the new zero.

In essence, I made myself my own worst enemy. Not the best for self-image, but it turned out great for excelling in schooling, professional life, and nerdy ways. Before geek became synonymous with chic, boobs could not sit around the table with young men and tell them how the rules worked without getting told how to do things incorrectly. You just kept your mouth shut and lead by bad-ass example. Which also did not go so well for snagging dates.

One growing up a girl nerd in the 80s and 90s helped me to love is failure, and you get a lot of it as a writer.

I send off my stories, and I've heard nothing but rejections, but I'm starting to hear some really good comments back on the stories I'm sending out. I get the story back, do some edits, turn around and send it to someone else (after moping around the house for 30 minutes, talking about how I'm a hack writer and will never succeed). I'll never get selected if I don't push past the point where I stop being bad at what I'm doing, and I got into this because I love writing.

I set a new bar for my own writing every time I see someone else do it better, no matter who they are. I read what they do, and if I like it, I try to mimic it in my own voice and my own way, trying to make it fit with whatever I'm working on. Irvine Welsh taught me how to write despicable people. Barbara Kingsolver taught me how to write non-cliched similes. George Orwell taught me how to create mood. Terry Pratchett taught me how to punch down while talking up.

I wrote fan-fiction for nineteen years before I decided to start taking writing seriously. It was a magic day when I decided to start working on my novel, my first original piece of fiction. At first I thought 350 pages was insurmountable. The book's now hovering at 500 pages, a behemoth of a thing. Writing fan-fiction for those nineteen years, I found a passion for writing, and wanted to take it somewhere beyond Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft, and Star Wars into something of my own design.

So what if I've made a lot of mistakes in my writing? If I don't keep setting that bar at a new zero from what I keep learning every day, I can't improve.

Not only do I have to be my own worst enemy, I have to be my greatest cheerleader.